Hot Fuzz co-writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg
In 2004, a little British comedy called Shaun of the Dead sent global audiences into hysterics and became a surprise box office hit. The creative forces behind it - writer/director Edgar Wright and writer/actor Simon Pegg - had made the film after a history of working together on television, most notably the BBC's much-lauded Spaced.
Off the happy success of Shaun of the Dead and taking steps not to give in to too much expectation (one preventative measure included holing up in a rural house for weeks in order to brainstorm and write uninterrupted), Wright and Pegg came up with their second collaborative feature, a spoof of American police action films from the 80’s that both had grown up with and loved.
The humor and creativity of Hot Fuzz drew together a remarkable cast including, of course, Pegg in the starring role as well as Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, and Edward Woodward—not to mention cameos by Cate Blanchett, Peter Jackson, and Steve Coogan. The quality of the actors is excelled only by the clever, cheeky script directing them and the distinct and hilarious vision of Edgar Wright.
I understand that you wanted to do film from a very early age. How did you make that happen and bring about making a living as a filmmaker?
I got my start making amateur films. My dad bought me and my brother a second-hand Super-8 camera, so from the age of about 14 I started making amateur films and that developed into making things on video. I won a video camera on a television competition, which was quite something because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford to have a camera. Once I had a video camera, I started making longer and longer films that ranged from shorts to hour-long little featurettes. They were all set in my hometown and were mostly spoofs of other genres, mainly comedy, which is a great way of experimenting of different genres. So I did about three hour-long films — this went through school and art college — and then I made one on 16mm, which I made when I was 20, which is called A Fist Full of Fingers.
Did you make the transition from video to 16mm through school? Were you in the process of academically getting knowledge while you were practicing?
Kind of. I was on a design course; it wasn’t a very high-level course, really, and I hadn’t actually done any 16mm so it was my first work on film and it was quite a shock to the system because in a weird way I had more control doing video stuff. I’d been able to shoot more and I had a higher ratio shooting on video. So it was quite a shock when it became like a 3:1 ratio when I’d shoot. Having done stuff with VHS and just shooting endlessly, I had like a 20:1 ratio. (Laughs)
So I made this 16mm film and I wasn’t especially happy with it; it wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be, but it did get shown theatrically in one cinema in London and through that I got a couple of nice reviews and an agent. Some comedians — Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who now do Little Britain; this was back in 1995 — saw the film and asked me to direct a skit show they were doing on TV. So I was really lucky to get this was when I was 21; it was very lucky to get straight into doing TV comedy at such an early age.
Comedy seems to be the kind of thing where you really have to have an aptitude for it straight off. Do you feel like maybe you were born to do it?
You know, it’s funny: I’m a fan of all genres, but I suppose because I’m from the U.K. a lot of genres you can’t really attempt without them being tongue-in-cheek. The whole raison d’être of Hot Fuzz is the fact that you’re watching these overblown events you usually only see in Hollywood films in a very rural, English setting. I suppose I like kind of both sides of it and in the way there’s not a lot of difference to setting up a joke as there is to setting up a shock in a horror film — they’re both reflected with gags. So I like that aspect, being able to kind of do comedy and genre together.
There’s a lot of stereotype in the movie that you guys play upon; the style of satire itself plays upon popular notions of what things should be, and then blows them out of proportion. One of the stereotypes about life in the U.K. is that it’s not necessarily filled with humor. It’s quite a juxtaposition then for Americans to be given a dose of their own stereotyping with this kind of a film. But at the same time there’s a lot of really brilliant comedy that comes out of the U.K. — you mentioned Little Britain and of course Spaced, which you were a part of. Have you ever thought about that perception that life in the U.K. is not necessarily humorous, yet there is such a great sense of humor as evidenced by these successful comedies?
I suppose there’s something about British humor that’s quite self-deprecating, essentially. It’s quite difficult to make a big generalization about all of British comedy. (Laughs)
Well, the closest that you might come to an American companion to Hot Fuzz would be something like Dumb & Dumber. We have a tradition of slapstick comedy whereas something like Hot Fuzz is very successful abroad and could be said to be a lot more witty and intelligent than something like Dumb & Dumber.
I like some of the Farrelly brothers’ films, but I think the thing that we tried to do with Shaun of the Dead and maybe Hot Fuzz is never really fall back on doing kind of gross-out gags, which certainly since something like Dumb and Dumber have become a kind of staple. That’s not really in Hot Fuzz or Shaun; there are not that many sexual jokes or jokes about body fluids. But that’s more a taste thing; it seems too easy to make those kinds of jokes. There’s been a lot of comedies in the wake of the Farrellys, like the American Pie series and even something like the Anchorman — although I really like Anchorman — that will go into much broader areas than we might. That isn’t to say that our film isn’t broad in places; sometimes it’s really silly. But I think our taste is doing slightly different things.
The way you talk about getting your feet wet in film and getting your practice down while you were growing up is very similar to the way that Robert Rodriguez talks about practicing filmmaking when he was young. I know that he contributed in a small way to this film, but how did you guys get together initially? He’s really an icon of independent filmmaking and do-it-yourself attitude — has that inspired you?
I’m very, very lucky and fortunate that a lot of my heroes of that ilk are big supporters of Shaun of the Dead: Robert, Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and also obviously Quentin Tarantino as well, but especially Sam, Peter, and Robert. I think all three of them had stories of how they got their start, which inspired a whole generation of filmmakers. Sam Raimi first, then Peter, then Robert. Pretty much I got into directing because of a documentary that I saw about Sam Raimi, which blew my mind about the making of Evil Dead and the fact that they were teenagers when they started it. That’s why I wanted to get into film.
With Robert, he came to see Shaun of the Dead and was a big supporter of it. Then he and Quentin asked me to do a trailer for Grindhouse, which I finished maybe three weeks ago. Robert and I were joking around and he was asking me who was doing the score for Hot Fuzz. I said, “I heard you were doing it for a dollar!” because he famously did the music for Kill Bill Vol. 2 for a dollar. And he said, “Yeah, sure!” We actually did have a composer, David Arnold, but as it turns out David had over 90 minutes of music to in three weeks. So I said, “You know what, David? We could give a couple of these things to Robert,” and he was like, “Oh, yeah, the more the merrier!” So Robert actually did his scenes out of context, which is funny — I just sent him those scenes to do.
Speaking of the technical way that you did things, this is a pretty huge leap from Shaun of the Dead in terms the set-ups, which are pretty auspicious. Plus, there’s a huge amount of coverage going on that you’re cutting with throughout the whole movie, especially the action sequences. How did you bolster yourself to be able to pull it all off?
With Shaun of the Dead, I had a similar experience as when I did Fistful of Fingers: I was pleased with how it looked, but there were times when I wasn’t getting as much coverage as I had done on Spaced the TV show and I found it frustrating. Not so much with the performances, sometimes more with the action stuff. When you’re doing action stuff, you cannot have enough coverage. With Hot Fuzz, because it was an action film, I really worked out a way with the DP right away: “There will never be such a thing as too many shots and we can never have enough set-ups.” So we sat down with that in mind. We wanted it to be really dense and the whole style of the editing is even more kind of accelerated and amplified than in Spaced and Shaun because of the nature of the material. It’s like a cop film and the whole joke is it’s being overtly aggressive given the picturesque setting. So the idea of doing these really bombastic transitions and lots of montage was the whole style for me.
Despite the fact that Shaun of the Dead was such a success and that you’re being supported by big names like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, I know you still weren’t graced with the kind of budget that somebody like Michael Bay has to work with.
Absolutely! You could make eight-and-a-half Hot Fuzzes for one Bad Boys 2. (Laughs)
Then, how did you make all of this come to fruition with restricted resources?
I think it’s just making sure the money’s on screen — it’s as simple as that. So, that’s really it. We just tried our darnedest to get all the money on screen, really.
But at the same time, you have a really amazing line-up of actors.
A huge cast! (Laughs)
Exactly. What did you do—get them all to work for a dollar, too?
Well, no, but nobody on Hot Fuzz was paid their highest rate they’ve ever been paid and a lot of people got paid nothing. But everybody understood that it was a large ensemble and it was going to be a bit more modest.
How many came on board because of Shaun of the Dead, both behind and in front of the camera?
Obviously a lot, because people are fans of it, but obviously there are some people who read it just as a script — some of the older actors who haven’t seen Shaun of the Dead just approached it as a script that they liked. But I think most people, you know, were aware of Shaun.
So due to Shaun’s success, did you feel lot of pressure to top it with Hot Fuzz? And again, back to the attention that you’d gotten from other filmmakers, did you feel really anxious about pulling this off and making it better than your previous work?
It was very ambitious and I’d never worked so hard on anything in my career, but it is good. There are times when you do call on advice...
Weirdly, Peter Jackson did a cameo on the film when he was in the U.K. for a week. I’d become friends with him after Shaun because he was a big supporter. As it turns out, the day that he came down, we’d been doing these four consecutive night shoots and it was a really, really tough shoot. I was thinking, “Oh, God, we’ve gotta do the rest of that scene and we’re already behind and we’re doing Peter Jackson’s thing and I hear that Peter wants to stick around on set and watch and oh, God, this is a really bad day!” (Laughs)
Since it was a night shoot, we had tea at like five o’clock, so as I sat having tea with Peter, I told him what had happened the night before and how bad it’d gone, that there were a lot of problems we were trying to fix. What was nice was he told me about a day on Lord of the Rings when he had a really bad time, a scene that looked fine in the end but was an absolute nightmare to shoot. So, in those situations, it’s amazing if you can have first-hand kind of fatherly advice. Later that night it actually went really well and I felt really good about it. I think it was the fact that he was there; it made me think, “Right — I can’t not be good tonight!” (Laughs)
Let’s backtrack to the writing process and how you function as a director while you’re writing — not to mention the fact that your co-writer is the main actor of the film. How do you guys work that out?
It’s a total collaboration — it’s not the case that I write the plot and the stage directions and Simon does the dialogue. We both write everything and the film is a total outpouring of our ideas. Though because I’m a director, I don’t write too much into the stage directions because if I’m reading somebody else’s script and it’s got lots of stage directions, I find it really annoying, especially if there’s anything about the camera moves. So I don’t write any of that into the script at all; I tend to leave all that out and try and keep the stage directions quite sparse because the storyboards will do that job, you know? So maybe that’s something that comes because I’m directing the script—I don’t feel the need to communicate the visuals as well.
Do your ambitions or limitations as a director — including the kind of budget you have to work with or your ideas about cast — inform the story as your writing? Or how do you keep that from informing the story if you don’t want it to?
To make the script not like reading a novel, you end up making like a separate document of the notes about dressing and costumes and little props and things going on. Like you go through the script and say, “The thing here is there’s this poster behind their head,” or, “The thing here is that we want the color scheme to not have any reds in it, so make everything earthy and make Nicholas and the police the only people who wear blue.” So you do a lot of that kind of stuff where you’re thinking about the color-coding of characters and the overall look whilst you’re writing. But not all of that is necessarily in the script.
Over these two films, have you been at war with yourselves between what you guys want to write versus what somebody who’s going to give you money might want to see or do?
No, we’ve never been in that situation where people have imposed ideas on us. It’s more just a thing of trying to achieve an efficient script with the budget.
And do you feel lucky that you’ve not had to capitulate in that way?
No, because we’ve always compromised; it’s always a struggle shooting something. On Shaun of the Dead we ended up having to compromise the ending we’d written because we ran out of time and money and we had to cut stuff out. So that’s tough. It’s not like it’s been an easy ride — we’ve worked really hard.
So in persisting with telling your specific story, this covers ground a lot of writers struggle with. In your case, you concentrate on a small town that is a reflection of the town where you grew up and came of age. Were you ever concerned about how that environment would carry across universally? How much of a tug of war is that for you as a storyteller?
I don’t think it is at all, really. I think it’s something you have in the back of your mind, maybe not to use specifically U.K. references. We do use one brand of ice cream, but that’s about it. If anything, we were encouraged by the fact that Shaun of the Dead had played so well in the U.S. — we realized that you don’t have to be specific. The worst crime is to try and be transatlantic and people that do scripts where they try too hard to appeal to everybody always end up falling flat. So I think the better thing is to be culturally specific.
You know, when you watch a film from a country, you want to know something of that culture. You wouldn’t want to watch a standardized version of Amelie; you wanna watch the most French version of Amelie you can see!
